Texas Representative Barton Against BP Corporate Responsibility to Victims

Tiny hands of God that you don't see. A lot of Republicans have been under fire for not adequately expressing outrage for British Petroleum's massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, despite the fact that this disaster in the oil industry will have the effect of destroying several other local industries, including fishing and tourism.

We think specifically of Representative Joe Barton of Texas, who referred to President Obama's desire to have BP pay for its mistake with a $20 billion victim fund as a "shakedown". The reasoning behind his defense of corporate messiness has to do with the ideology of unrestrained capitalism. The idea of personalized freedom (a good thing), transposed upon everything else in the world--like doing business--makes for a lot of faulty assumptions that result in ridiculous policies. For while freedom is good for everyone personally, any number of people will take that freedom and use it for really stupid things that impact others: theft, murder, property damage. We pass laws and regulate individuals, reducing freedom in order to allow maximum freedom.

The ability to adversely impact a massive number of innocents is exacerbated when we are looking at the behavior of corporations as they engage in free enterprise. In most instances they are capable of inflicting outcomes on large swathes of the population and no individual person can stand up to that on their own. Hence laws and regulations.

And for every backwater delusional congressman who is proclaiming an ode to free markets and lamenting the harsh treatment of a corporation like BP, there are any number of laws and regulations that are preventing some large or small injustice to the population at large.

Today's example, from an article in The Atlantic:

In January, the NYSE fined Credit Suisse $150,000 for “failing to adequately supervise the development, deployment, and operation of a proprietary algorithm.” The fine was a pittance, but more troubling was that the bank didn’t even know that its malfunctioning algo (which sent hundreds of thousands of cancel-and-replace requests for orders that hadn’t been made) had crippled some of the NYSE’s trading stations until regulators called them the next day. This spring, a newsletter from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago warned: “Although algorithmic trading errors have occurred, we likely have not yet seen the full breadth, magnitude, and speed with which they can be generated. Furthermore, many such errors may be hidden from public view.”

(The Atlantic)

Little Joe from Texas, the highest ranking Republican on the Energy and Commerce Committee, is not going to be paying attention to high speed automated trading on Wall Street and how it impacts the noble goal of raising capital for American businesses. Nor is Joe going to be focused on any number of other regulations that actually serve to prevent minor or total chaos. Joe has an ideology that simplifies everything for him into one cookie cutter reactionary stance, that private enterprise can do no wrong and regulatory actions by the government are always suspect. It's this same sort of philosophy that is in part hanging up financial reform legislation, with industry supported congressmen not wanting to make the banks pay in advance for their own salvage fund. (Republicans went so far as to call an industry financed bailout fund a taxpayer fund, turning reality on its head).

And yet, we vote for deep thinkers like Joe time and again. He  needs to stick to introducing college football playoff legislation in Congress and keep his mouth from uttering words his brain can't cash.